Intellivore - Diane Duane [73]
“So will a lot of other people in this part of space,” said Ileen, “in a couple of hundred years.”
Picard nodded. “I take it that the explosion remnant is still active …”
“Captain, it’ll be active for years,” Geordi said. “The total amount of energy released in an annihilation like that is nearly quasarlike.” The engineer sighed. “At any rate, we’ll let Starfleet know that this object is something that ships coming out this way should not approach closely. There’s a lot of very hard radiation streaming out of that thing. If you popped out of warp too near it, you could not only burn your sensors out, but your own warp engines might react badly—energy output of that kind can adversely affect subspace structure. Also, this area is going to be a subspace radio ‘blind spot’ for a good while—some years, I would imagine.”
“Very well … we’ll so inform them.” Picard looked at his own padd. “Is there anything else that needs our attention at the moment?”
People looked at one another. Heads were shaken. “Captain,” Data said, “only this: I want to make sure that all the information I garnered from the intellivore is twinned over to Marignano, for eventual archival at Starfleet and distribution among the Federation’s science resources. Some of it was very subjective and obscure—’memories’ of planets it attacked or, in some cases, merely passed by; scraps of data about its technology … other such material. With extended analysis, of the kind for which I will not have that much time, the information it inflicted on me may yet do as much good as the intellivore itself did harm. It was a tremendous repository of knowledge, though it scorned the knowledge itself.”
“All right,” said Picard. “See to it, and use whatever resources and assistance you need. But, Mr. Data, just one more question about the intellivore.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Are there any more?”
Data looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head. “If there were, Captain,” he said, “the intellivore itself did not know about them. And I would suspect that its first intention, should it discover another like itself, would be to try to devour it as well. The life-form that the intellivore had become was most profoundly inimical to life, even its own kind—evidence of which lies in its own earlier history. When its individual parts could not find others to prey on, they would gladly devour one another. And if they had ever reached a point where there remained no intelligent life for them to devour—a point they did indeed reach in at least one other galaxy—and could neither find more nor move in pursuit of it, it is my judgment that the life-form would then have attempted to devour its own components.”
“There was an old story in which someone did that,” Ileen said, musing. “Some angry god punished him with hunger so terrible that he ate all the food there was, and then started devouring himself.”
“B-four-one-two-four-point-six,” Data said.
There were slight, sad smiles around the table.
“Yes,” said Picard softly. “Well. Is that all? … Then, dismissed.”
The bridge crews went out, but Maisel lingered a little, looking out the windows at the stars, until the doors shut.
“Something?” Picard said, rising to go and join her.
“We must be pointing the wrong way,” Ileen said. “I can’t see it.”
Picard briefly did a course assessment in his head. “It would be almost directly behind us,” he said, “if I’m any judge of these things.”
Captain Maisel nodded. “Somewhere,” she said, “in a few hundred years, someone will look out the window and see that, and run off to write someone else a letter. And astronomy on that planet will never be the same.”
She turned away from the window. “How are you holding up?” she said.
Picard stood looking out that window as well. “I would be lying to you,” he said, “if I said ‘all right.’ It has been, well, a rather energetic week. And one of our good ones has been lost …”
“Yes,” Ileen said.
She let out a long breath then and looked toward the window again. “I can’t get it out of my head,” Ileen